International Center for Tropical Agriculture

The Challenge: Maize, beans and bananas are essential components of African diets and livelihoods, and are under extreme threat from climate change. A major study from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), published in Nature Climate Change, provided for the first time a timeline for action to preserve food security, detailing exactly when agricultural regions across Africa will need to transform. CIAT approached Marchmont to deliver a communications campaign to amplify the key messages of the report and offer practical advice to policymakers and donors on how to take action.

Our Approach: Marchmont first distilled the key messages of the study into a two-page media summary and press release. We positioned the story against the backdrop of the El-Niño induced drought that was affecting large areas in Southern and Eastern Africa at the time, asking journalists: Is El Niño the tip of the iceberg for African farmers? In addition, Marchmont created a series of animated GIFs for sharing on social media, which extracted the key takeaways from the study in a visually engaging way.